WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — President Joe Biden’s nominee to help run an important foreign aid agency is running into a roadblock due to his support for partial-birth abortions.
Atul Gawande, Biden’s nominee for assistant administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) supports partial-birth abortion.
USAID is tasked with carrying out foreign aid distribution and oversight, and President Biden has prioritized abortion funding as a policy goal for the agency.
Pro-life groups and politicians have criticized Gawande’s support for abortion and warned about allowing his confirmation.
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio delayed a vote on Gawande’s nomination in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “Atul Gawande’s defense of infanticide is disqualifying,” Rubio said in an October 19 statement.
Rubio placed a “hold” on the nominee, which means the nomination cannot move forward without at least 60 votes.
He called on Biden to withdraw his USAID assistant administrator nominee. “Infanticide should be condemned, not celebrated, but Gawande’s radical, anti-life views are becoming mainstream in today’s Democratic Party,” Rubio said. “President Biden should withdraw Gawande’s nomination and replace him with someone who is committed to upholding the agency’s mission of saving lives.”
Pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List likewise took issue with Gawande and called him an “abortion extremist.”
🧵 Biden just nominated abortion extremist Atul Gawande to serve as assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Tomorrow the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will vote on the nomination.
They must reject him. Here’s why:
1/10 pic.twitter.com/eYvk1sgOKl
— Susan B. Anthony List (@SBAList) October 18, 2021
“This barbaric method was designed to ensure an accidental birth of a LIVE late-term baby wouldn’t happen,” the group said.
“A federal ban on the barbaric partial-birth abortion method was enacted in 2003, and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007,” SBA List noted. “But Biden’s USAID nominee, Atul Gawande, sees nothing wrong with the procedure.”
Pro-abortion group thinks the nominee does not go far enough
Criticism of Gawande goes back to a 1998 opinion piece from the nominee, written during a debate over a ban on partial-birth abortion. President Bill Clinton vetoed the legislation, but President George W. Bush later signed a ban, which stands to this day.
“Partial-birth abortion is, if anything, less grotesque,” Gawande wrote in a 1998 Slate article. His position in the opinion piece is that pro-lifers were strategically wrong to pursue a ban on partial-birth abortions and that just because the abortion procedure is “gross” it does not make it wrong.
“It seems hardly anyone uses partial-birth abortion, and if it’s banned, almost no one will miss it,” Gawande, who is a surgeon, said in his article. “That partial-birth abortion is rare and inessential makes it easier, no doubt,” for pro-abortion politicians to support a ban on it, he argued.
Pro-abortion group Equity Forward said his 1998 essay showed he leaned too much toward the pro-life side, but it said he is now more supportive of abortion, if he was not back then.
“Gawande has a complicated record regarding reproductive health, rights, and justice, having authored controversial articles in the past that came across as especially problematic when evaluated through a modern lens,” the group wrote in an entry about him. “However, in recent years, he has signaled support for abortion rights, finding particular issue with anti-abortion tactics and medical malpractice.”
USAID has a history of supporting eugenics, abortion
The agency has a history of supporting sterilization, abortion and eugenics.
“Documents reveal that USAID has for more than two decades been at the helm of India’s family planning programs, not just funding them, but overseeing and orchestrating the entire program,” LifeSiteNews reported in 2015.
In 2010, the agency undertook a marketing effort to convince Filipino women to take contraceptives to suppress their fertility, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews.
President Donald’s Trump policy for the agency was to ensure it protected religious liberty and did not fund abortions.